


About the Bread

by kristophine



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, and love is a spare pot of marmalade, historical vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 08:17:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20422808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristophine/pseuds/kristophine
Summary: Crawly did have an uncomfortable moment about the whole thing right about the time when Ramses was going a bit overboard on the monuments. It seemed like perhaps someone ought to say something to him about the slave labor, only it wouldn’t have been very appropriate of Crawly to say whatever it was that ought to be said, would it.





	About the Bread

**Author's Note:**

> As per my usual, thanks to saathi1013 for making this flow. You've made me so much better.

Crawly _did_ have an uncomfortable moment about the whole thing right about the time when Ramses was going a bit overboard on the monuments. It seemed like perhaps someone ought to say something to him about the slave labor, only it wouldn’t have been very appropriate of Crawly to say whatever it was that ought to be said, would it. He’d been thinking about hunting up Aziraphale—a bit more challenging before the invention of the telegraph, but he’d done worse—to have a word with him about the plight of his friend Nebwenef. He could drop a metaphorical bug into Aziraphale’s ear about the situation and see if they couldn’t come to an understanding.

The problem was that Nebwenef’s wife made a really outstanding beer, and if you caught her in just the right mood she wouldn’t even water it down; and so he was half-drunk or perhaps a bit more when Nebwenef threw an arm around Crawly’s shoulders and shouted genially, “—and you know, I have a very handsome cousin! He doesn’t even mind foreigners!”

“I,” said Crawly, “What now?”

Nebwenef shrugged, smiling. “Well, it’s not as if you’re going to settle down with a _woman,_ now, are you?”

“I couldn’t—well, I _really_ couldn’t say.” Crawly had, at that point, spent roughly two millennia on Earth and one might argue that he lacked life experience, although doing the celestial math to get any kind of _true_ age was quite involved and required the presence of a perfectly flawless quartz sphere the size of a bowling ball, as well as thirteen pomegranates harvested under the full moon with a pure silver sickle.

The fact that he truly _couldn’t_ say, in no small part because he was a genderless divine creation, somehow failed to prevent his cheeks from turning bright red.

“Ah, well,” said Nebwenef indulgently. “You’re a young man yet. You have plenty of time.”

“Er.” Crawly wasn’t sure how to address that neither _young_ nor _man_ accurately encompassed him as an entity, but thank the infernal legions, his friend’s wife (Nefer-something; Nefertari? Neferu-Re?) leaned over and poured more beer, and Crawly could stifle any urge to discuss the relative merits of monotheism and turn the subject back to the problems involved in obtaining quality stone for all of these bothersome monuments.

The problem was, it wasn’t that he didn’t _know_ perfectly well what Nebwenef meant. He’d been tempting humans to sins of the flesh for ages. The number of sexual acts one can see or hear about in the course of two thousand years is, if not the sum total of them, since humans are always inventing new devices with which to assist themselves, still quite instructive.

So of _course_ he knew that Nebwenef was trying to help. He hadn’t gotten around to committing any sins of the flesh himself at that point. (He’d come nearest it with an ancient priestess of Breton, which was an episode he preferred to forget.) But the thing he couldn’t quite come to terms with, the thing that left him uneasy in his mind, was that at the precise moment he had understood what Nebwenef was trying to say, he had thought to himself, _Oh, but that would upset Aziraphale tremendously._

Surely he hadn’t been avoiding carnal sins to avoid _upsetting Aziraphale._ That would just be ridiculous. He hadn’t seen the need for them, that was all, and it wasn’t as though _he_ had a drive for them. Drives like that were for humans. Celestial entities had no need for carnality, any more than they had a need for foo—

“Oh,” said Aziraphale with evident delight, dropping to sit cross-legged next to Crawly in the sand. “Honey-basted gazelle! My favourite.”

“How do you have a favourite? It’s been three pharaohs since you even dropped by.”

“Nice to see you, too, Crawly.” Aziraphale smiled at him, eyes twinkling, as he stole a not-inconsiderable helping of gazelle.

Crawly resolutely banished any question of whether he had lost his mind (impossible; demons couldn’t lose their minds as their minds were eighth-dimensional constructs and thus very firmly anchored in multiple planes, and furthermore emitted the most annoying beeping noise if they got more than two astral levels away from their soul) or simply gone soft with respect to Aziraphale (equally impossible; demons have no capacity to go soft about anything, it’s a well-known metallurgical fact).

“Rather nice pyramids, don’t you think?” he said instead, and began to drop a few hints about how disagreeable it must be to work in the sun like that.

It took some _decidedly_ unpleasant scenes to finally deal with the labor question, and by the end of it Crawly was heartily sick of the _name_ Moses.

One might wonder whether he started the whole business with the Ptolemies out of pique, but then, Crawly had always liked the things that happened when you imported foreign rulers. They _inevitably_ got high-handed with the local populace and started making absurd demands, and they scattered misery and sin like throwing handfuls of grain to chickens. The bloody peasant uprisings were just icing on the cake.

Aziraphale wasn’t impressed, of course. “You realize,” he said, adjusting his toga fastidiously, “nothing good will come of this.”

“That’s rather the point.”

“I’ve no idea why you’re still here.” Aziraphale huffed angrily when the bread set in front of them was hard and half-full of something unidentifiable that had no business being in a bread loaf. He picked it up and glared at it as balefully as if it had just insulted his ancestry. “Antony’s going to burn everything with or without you, at this point.”

Crawly nodded across the street in the general direction of the palace. “_She’s _a rare treat, though.”

“Really?” Aziraphale cocked his head to the side. “She’s not particularly beautiful, is she?”

“Don’t be so commonplace. It’s not her looks. It’s her brain. She’s got this magnificent, simmering talent that’s a bit hard to describe, but she can wind every man she meets around her little finger, and half the women, too.”

Aziraphale tried a bite of the bread and spat it out in hurried distaste.

“She’s got class,” said Crawly a bit wistfully.

“Hmph.” Aziraphale discreetly disappeared his bread with a finger-snap. Crawly was still gnawing on his intermittently; he’d personally started the trend of adulterating bread and was very proud of how much wrath it had stirred up over time. The gluey texture and the taste of dust was a sweet reminder of his success.

“You have to see her in action to understand it.” He’d showed her his demonic form (not the whole thing, he didn’t want her to go stark raving mad) exactly once; she’d narrowed her eyes at him and then smirked, in an impressive display of what had to have been either bravado or truly unshakable confidence.

Aziraphale never did get to see her, though. There was an incident with a snake. No one Crawly knew, and he found he regretted the loss of Cleopatra in the world, because it was like a glorious, sinister light had gone out.

When the library at Alexandria burned, Aziraphale blamed him personally (apparently without the Ptolemies there was no Caesar, and without Caesar one would still have been able to browse oodles and oodles of books at leisure) and refused to speak to him for—oh, decades, until the whole Christ situation. It was dreadfully dull.

The less said about the First Millennium the better, in Crowley’s considered opinion.

“—and then she said, would you mind just tempting me a little more?” Crowley sipped his fermented mare’s milk. He rather liked it, although he half-resented how much _more_ enthusiastic Aziraphale seemed to get about it than Crowley could manage. “And I said, look, Great Empress, you’ve got the whole Mongolian Empire, I’ve already offered you eternal fame and glowing youth, what more do you want?”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Aziraphale over his cup of kumis.

“She wanted to be half a hand taller.”

Aziraphale blinked. “Oh. Well, that’s easy enough.”

“I’ll never understand them.” Crowley nodded out at the twinkling campfires that dotted the steppes around them. “You hand them the world on a platter, or, well, I suppose her illustrious father-in-law the Khan did, and they’re still thinking about all these little things. The people they like, the people they don’t, whether so-and-so likes their hair. It seems like they can’t focus even when they’re at the very top.”

“They have their priorities. Rather different than ours, but I can hardly fault them.”

“Of course _you_ can’t fault them, angel,” said Crowley. He was on his fourth cup of kumis and feeling a mild, expansive glow. “You’re perpetually forgiving and charmed by their peculiarities.”

“You can’t deny they are charming.”

Crowley made a vague noise that was plausibly deniable agreement. There were strains of a mournful ballad drifting through the still night air; Crowley knew this one, about a longing for a place to which one could never return. It grated on him a bit, like the bite of a horsefly—oh, no, that was an actual horsefly. He turned it to ash with a vengeful thought. “I suppose.”

“No, really. Think about it. They’re fragile vessels for the incomprehensible—well, to them—power of the soul, and they spend such a short time here, and what do they do with it? They eat and drink, they sing and dance, they make love and they tell stories.”

“They get drunk out of their minds.” Crowley raised his bowl.

“Come now, the wine in Carolingia was _much _worse.”

“That would be… hard to dispute.”

“I’m just a bit envious, you know,” Aziraphale confided. He was smiling faintly, looking out at the fires. “They feel the cold, of course, but imagine how they must feel the warmth.”

Crowley made a noncommittal noise and took another drink.

Aziraphale spent a good chunk of the next century in India, and when they next met up he had taken to wearing the most heavily embroidered fabrics he could find among the craftsman of the Mughals. It was particularly upsetting that he could make the turban look good. Crowley had found that turbans just made him look gaunt.

“Careful you don’t get in the bad books for vanity,” muttered Crowley.

“Nonsense.” Aziraphale elbowed him casually as they walked through the marketplace. “A little fine feathering goes a long way towards making them feel at ease with me.”

“Fashions change_,_ my dear angel. Any minute now you’ll realize that you’re hopelessly behind the times.”

“That’s not so bad. They tend to see old as formal, and isn’t that fitting for a heavenly visitation?”

“I suppose I’ve seen you in worse.”

Aziraphale huffed in annoyance. “Oh, you’re not going to go on about the Cymri again, are you?”

“Blue body paint! Stark naked!”

“You’re a bit of a prude, aren’t you? I can’t say that I’d noticed it.”

“I am _not_ a prude! You—how could—I’m a _demon!_”

“Yes, and that hardly rules it out. How many of your compatriots have even had bodily knowledge of a human?”

“I—well. As far as—I don’t believe…”

“_None_ of them?” Aziraphale laughed out loud. “I know some people making indiscreet woodcuts who would be dreadfully disappointed.”

“Oh, come off it! We don’t need to engage in sins of the flesh _with_ them to get their souls, they’re more than happy enough to do it with each other!”

“Quite creatively, as it happens.”

“Quite,” muttered Crowley, mind shying away from some of the more creative applications of the idea he’d seen over the centuries.

“At least the artists seem to think you’re quite fetching.” Aziraphale was clearly trying, and failing, not to smirk.

“I despise you,” Crowley loftily informed him.

“You do nothing of the kind.”

“At any rate, it’s less work.”

“Crowley…” Aziraphale glanced heavenward. “Are you laboring under the impression that making love is _work?_”

“They get very sweaty doing it!” Crowley had hoped he’d sound less defensive, but alas. “It’s a reasonable supposition!”

Aziraphale just chuckled, maddeningly, shaking his head. The feather plume from his turban tickled Crowley’s face.

Someone in the street shouted suddenly; a horse had gotten loose and was about to trample a young woman with a baby on her hip. Crowley snapped his fingers, and she was abruptly relocated several feet to one side, bewildered but safe.

“That’s one for you,” he told the angel without looking. “Saving your snapping fingers. Wouldn’t want you to wear them out, you know, get arthritis, that kind of thing. Joint degeneration is such a bore.”

“Of course.”

“You owe me one.”

“That’s debatable.”

“What _couldn’t_ an angel debate?” Crowley snorted. “You’ve been insufferable ever since Socrates.”

Crowley did, after that, tempt the occasional target to sins of the flesh personally, and if anyone had bothered to suggest that he did it out of pique, he would have loftily told them that they were mistaken. He’d turned down Boudicca because he’d found better ways to collaborate with her, and besides, nothing made humans _stupid_ quite like unrequited passion. But he had a knack for it, and it worked wonders on Czarinas and the occasional Czar. Couldn’t complain.

Hell liked it, naturally, although Crowley still couldn’t bring himself to take credit for the things in the woodcuts. He thought Beelzebub seemed a little too interested in those, but he didn’t think about it overlong.

“Oh, come _on,_” said Crowley. “I can’t believe you wanted to meet _here._”

“It’s not my fault you don’t have even the most rudimentary grasp of politics on this continent, just because it’s not full of those Roman orgies you miss so much. They’re very important to intertribal relations along—well, really, this entire _coast,_ not to mention their reach inland!”

“It’s the pemmican, isn’t it? Of course you like pemmican! You never could turn down anything with berries.”

“Not everything has to be about food!”

“Funny how most things are, though, when it comes to you, angel.” Crowley nudged Aziraphale with his shoulder; Aziraphale rolled his eyes.

Later, one of the Haida elders gave Crowley a sidelong glance and said, “Your young man seems nice.”

“Well,” said Crowley. “He’s not _that_ young.”

(It hardly seemed worth explaining that Aziraphale’s pleasantly lined face had been personally designed by some nameless angel of Heaven tasked with creating earthly flesh for the purposes of the Lord, and that depending on the system of maths you used, you could see him as being rather in the middle of an enormous figure eight of time.)

Then he and Aziraphale got distracted with Napoleon and Wellington, respectively, and the next time Crowley thought to check in with them things had changed, considerably, for the worse, and Crowley sat there in the rained-out ruins of what had been a lovely village and thought about the conquistadors into whose ears he’d breathed dreams of greatness.

He slept through a century after that. Give or take.

The end of the world did come as a terrible surprise, of course, and Crowley, if pressed, would certainly have described himself as someone with no small amount of experience dealing with surprises that were objectively terrible, but the Apocalypse had to be classed entirely separately from all non-world-ending surprises.

The fact that he survived it was startling. The fact that Aziraphale survived it was a miracle, and not the minor kind.

He didn’t say _thank You,_ but it was a near thing.

There was a window of peace, but like any peace (Crowley thought, longingly, of the 1920s in Berlin), it was limited by external factors. Once the instructions restarted, just a few hesitant demonic whispers at first but settling into a confident trickle from Below, there was bound to be some friction.

“_Crowley!_”

Crowley flinched away from the phone. He’d gotten a lovely little mobile, so small it was desperately fragile and easy to lose, another one of his minor but inspired additions to the frustrations of daily life. “Ease up, angel, you’ll blow out my eardrum! What is it this time?”

“Brexit!” Aziraphale sounded _furious._ “This has you written all over it!”

“Ah,” said Crowley carefully. “Well, the thing is, I did meet some people at a fundraiser a while back, and I might have said a few things—”

“I can’t believe you!”

“They were already thinking along those lines. I just gave them a few tips. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to sow discord!”

“After I went all the way to America for you just the other week!”

“I thought you were there for the crabcakes!”

“I could have gotten crabcakes _without_ having to talk to Mitch McConnell!”

“Look, I _didn’t_ do Thatcher, don’t I get some credit for that?”

“Of course you didn’t do Thatcher, we did!”

“I’m tired of shouting!” Crowley yelled into the phone. “Let’s stop this row!”

There was a moment’s pause, and then Aziraphale said wearily, “Crowley, so many bad things are going to happen.”

“I know! That’s the whole point. That’s my _job._”

“Really? Still?”

“Really. Still.”

“They tried to kill you.”

“They’re _demons._ That was hardly the _first_ time. Surviving an assassination attempt is a little like a promotion, but with less paperwork. If I survive a few more times, I might get a corner office.”

“In the corner of _what?_”

“Besides, your people had a go at killing you, too, in case you’d forgotten about that little incident!”

Aziraphale made a muffled noise. “Crowley, I’m sorry, I haven’t the—the time to debate this. You’re going to… they’re bad people, and they’re going to make people suffer.”

“I didn’t see you stopping _Trump._”

“Well. Above had some thoughts on—I had orders.”

“Really?” asked Crowley viciously. “_Still?_”

Aziraphale blew out an exasperated breath. “Very well.”

“Remember Cain?” Crowley picked at a hangnail while his phone tried to slip from beneath his chin.

“Yes.”

“Terribly hairy. Had that red tint to it, rather nice.”

“Crowley…”

“Bit of a raw deal, don’t you think?”

“He did commit murder, after all.”

“Plenty of murderers since then that never got nabbed for it.”

“Hm,” said Aziraphale, which was the closest he was going to come to agreeing with Crowley. Perhaps thinking of a column of flame.

“Look,” said Crowley, a bit desperately, “I know it’s all a sodding mess, I _know_ that, but there isn’t much I can do about it. The humans did ninety-nine percent of this on their own, and I just do what makes sense. Don’t—” but he choked on the rest of what he might have liked to say, and gave up, hissing instead.

“I see.” Aziraphale sounded very tired.

“Do you?”

“I think so.”

“Because really,” said Crowley, “I’d like it very much if—”

“Dinner?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet you at the Wolsley.”

“Good.” Crowley felt a rush of relief.

The dinner started out a bit strained, but somewhere around the third course Aziraphale seemed to forgive him, lapsing into fonder words and glances. Crowley tried not to admit to himself how terribly important it was, and that he was watching Aziraphale to calculate exactly how forgiven he was.

Demons didn’t, as a rule, dream (their eighth-dimensional minds couldn’t quite stretch that way), but Crowley thought for a split second that he might be when he walked into his flat and found Aziraphale only half-corporeal.

The human body was sitting on the couch in one plane, and on the next three planes the angelic manifestation was fragmenting and re-forming quick as a thought, a cloud of brilliant eyes, all hard and piercing ultramarine, flashing fragments of stark white illuminated wings.

“For Hell’s sake!” Crowley flung up a hand in front of his face to ward off the light. “Can’t you turn that down?”

“Crowley,” said Aziraphale. He said it across all four planes at once, so it came out as a low long hum. But unlike the buzzing unpleasant scratch of Beelzebub’s voice, this was a true celestial harmony, a single voice in four parts. The eyes turned to look at him, a moment’s sphere like the ball a school of fish would form underwater, glittering blue-silver.

It was awful, hearing his name like that: like a song from six thousand years ago, from Before, when he was home. Oh, certainly he’d jostled and fought, like any child, needling his siblings, taunting his parent—but how could that have possibly justified any of it?

“Put that away!”

“I’m sorry,” said Aziraphale, voice still an unutterably beautiful personal insult. “I can’t seem to—pin myself down. I’m—drifting.”

“Oh.” Crowley was suddenly full of an uncomfortable sensation which he was able to identify after a moment’s reflection as mind-melting fear.

“I think I might be,” Aziraphale paused, the body on the couch shuddering, the eyes and wings seesawing in and out of existence, “falling.”

“Nonsense,” said Crowley briskly. He stalked by the couch where mostly-Aziraphale sat. “You made it through the whole event, why would you fall _now?_ You need a cup of tea, you’ll feel better. I’ll put the kettle on.” He realized, as he started to rifle through his cupboards, that he was going to need to manifest the kettle into existence, and that his imposingly large black glass-topped range was poorly suited to the task, so an electric kettle it would be. And to think he’d felt so proud when all the hottest architects rendered high-end flats increasingly unlivable.

“I’m not sure,” said Aziraphale. His voice was almost human. Crowley didn’t dare look, even though he could see the scattering of lights as the facets shifted. “I can’t imagine what I would have—what would have changed, now.”

“So it can’t be that. You’ll see. A cuppa will have you right as rain.” His hands shook as he gave up on the kettle situation and heated the water the quick way. He went a bit too far in the wrong direction, and he could tell it was hot enough to vaporize human flesh when he dropped the teabag in, so he let it steep but dialed it down a few notches.

“Maybe it’s only,” Aziraphale sighed, running out of breath, “a _phase._”

“There you go.” Crowley plunked the cup down on the coffee table and, after an agonized moment, sat down next to Aziraphale without looking over at him. He was too close. He could feel the wingbeats beside his face. He was much too close.

“_Oh,_” said Aziraphale in quite a different voice. “Oh, my. Oh.”

“What—” Crowley started to say, and then felt a the edge of a wing (a feather; a sword; a feather; a lightning bolt) dragging over his cheek. It knocked the wind out of him. _He’d_ remained firmly corporeally anchored, thank you very much, but the fabric of his being knew angelic resonance when it felt it, and it was—well, for reference, Crowley had been there when the seas were invented; he’d stood at the side of the first ocean and breathed the first breath of salt air that ever wafted over sand, watching the sun come up over the giant, rolling mirror, breaking into a thousand colours, each more marvelous than the last, and this made that look about as exciting as a trip to the post box.

It was peculiar, experiencing it while incorporated. It made the effort into nothing at all. His body was straining towards it, and he was panting, hard in his trousers.

“I don’t think,” Aziraphale said, voice skewing wildly out of control, from a single note to four to sixteen back to one, “that you’re quite—in your right mind at the moment, and perhaps—neither am I.”

“Well, then.” Crowley heard his own voice, particularly sibilant in the etherically vibrating stillness of the flat. He didn’t sweat, as a rule. He briefly considered taking it up as a hobby. “You’d better have some tea.”

“Yes. Quite.” Aziraphale reached out. His human hands picked up the cup, and he sighed a little as he took a sip.

They sat quietly for a moment.

“Any better?” asked Crowley, without looking over.

“Rather,” said Aziraphale, sounding puzzled. “This seems a bit familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“Hm?”

“The tea. What kind is it?”

Crowley shrugged. “A rather nice lapsang souchong I picked up in China a while back.”

“Mm.” Aziraphale inhaled deeply over it. The harmonic disturbances were, actually, settling; Crowley dared a glance over and he only saw a handful of eyes, a few wings, smaller, now, more like a sparrow. “Well, I’m feeling a touch better, at any rate. Had it been blessed, do you know?”

“As if I’d have anything blessed in my home!” Crowley felt unaccountably insulted. The feeling sharpened when Aziraphale looked up from the mug and raised his eyebrows, skeptically, gesturing down at himself. “That’s different.” (Neither of them mentioned the Thermos. It was long gone, anyway.)

“Yes, of course.” Aziraphale coughed delicately. “I’ll just—be going now.”

“If you must,” Crowley said before he could help himself.

“Well, _really,_” said Aziraphale, going pink. He’d settled down completely on the higher planes and was once again contained inside his skin.

“There’s an absolutely smashing programme we should watch. There are decapitations in _every episode._”

“You’re not doing all that well at tempting me.”

“I’ll order in Ethiopian.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Is not! I’ll get extra injera.”

Crowley had drifted off—decapitations were so _lulling_ when one knew one’s head, and the heads of one’s friends, were safe on their shoulders—when Aziraphale suddenly said, “Oh, blimey!”

“Hmm?” He struggled back to wakefulness, only partially successfully. “What ‘s it?”

“It’s the stellar conjugation.” Aziraphale looked deeply embarrassed when Crowley cracked open an eye and squinted at his face in the near-dark. The colours all bled out of things in the dark, but of course he could still see Aziraphale perfectly well, in grays like a nice charcoal drawing. “I quite forgot. Same thing happened, oh, twelve or fourteen centuries ago, I think. The celestial harmonies converge in a way that makes me fray a bit around the edges.”

“Ah,” said Crowley, and let himself sink down more peacefully into sleep. Well, sleep of a sorts. A demon didn’t _need_ to sleep, but then, a demon didn’t very well need a fine Beaujolais, either, and that had never stopped either of them.

He still didn’t dream. It would be downright gauche, really.

Watching Aziraphale was, as far as hobbies went, not a bad one. It wasn’t like he’d taken up macramé. He didn’t particularly care to admit that he’d picked it up, but somewhere along the way he had, and it had only gotten worse since the Apocalypse.

Which was why he noticed when Aziraphale shifted uncomfortably for the third or fourth time halfway through their espressos at a fun little place tucked away in Soho.

“What is it?” asked Crowley, only half his mind on the question.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Oh, now.”

“Crowley…” There was a bit of a whinge to Aziraphale’s voice.

Crowley leaned forward, sniffing a bit. “Now I’ve got to know. The new body getting a bit tetchy?”

“Nonsense!”

“Aaaaaangel,” drawled Crowley as obnoxiously as he could manage. “What is it? Tell me. You know I shan’t get _any_ less annoying with repetition.”

Aziraphale sighed in annoyance. “Fine. It’s the celestial convergence. It drags on a bit, and I’m getting itchy on the fifth plane again.”

“Well,” said Crowley, “you could always go shake them out a bit.”

Aziraphale looked scandalized. “I most certainly could not!”

“Come on. We’ll pop over to Brighton. You can get the wings a bit damp. Sea air will do you good.”

“Pop over—it’s a bit more serious than that!”

“And now it’s _serious._ Surely you can put up with a little ride to scratch that itch.”

“A little ride! I don’t believe for a _second_ that you’re doing this strictly out of concern for my welfare,” muttered Aziraphale, giving his brandy a firm swirl in the snifter.

“Do I have to be? What are the moral implications if—”

“Oh, stop that nonsense.”

“Your words, not mine.” Crowley made sure to give Aziraphale a gleaming smile, all teeth.

Aziraphale wasn’t too fastidious about the niceties of good and evil to get into the Bentley with Crowley, with the white cliffs of Dover in mind, and they struck out bravely. (Crowley might have shivered slightly while crossing the M25 orbital, but no one need look too closely at that.)

“What do y’think of this new thing where the chefs make, whatsit, the flavored air?” asked Crowley. He knew that would buy him some time, and he wasn’t disappointed; Aziraphale was still talking about what counted as haute cuisine and the meaning of Michelin stars when the Bentley rolled to a stop beside a darkened beach.

The slam of the car’s door echoed, muffled, in the close night air, full of salt and humidity. Aziraphale drew a deep breath in through his nose.

“Angel,” said Crowley, “fancy a little flight?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Aziraphale glanced up guiltily at the moon, which burned a bright and steady white over the landscape. The cliffs were electric.

“Come on, now.”

“It hardly seems appropriate to give in to such a banal temptation.”

“You’re itching for it,” Crowley wheedled. “Come, now. You were made to fly, weren’t you? How can it be a _bad_ thing to do what you were made for?”

“That’s the line of questioning that landed Eve in hot water,” muttered Aziraphale, but he was casting longing, guilty glances at the water. Crowley knew just how satisfying it was to fly as close to the waves as you could manage without catching your wing-tips in them; the spray in your face, a bracing blast of chill air. It took a tremendous amount of energy, flying in bodies that weren’t quite right for it, but oh, it was worth it.

And indeed, Aziraphale was starting to unbutton his waistcoat, jacket already discarded on the sand.

“I’ll press it later,” said Aziraphale when he caught the direction of Crowley’s glance, and then he shrugged off his waistcoat and, shortly, his shirt. He was wavering between dimensions, just as he had the other—that night; his shoulders gleamed in the moonlight, the soft human curves of him flickering perceptibly into the harsh, uncompromising piecemeal of another plane altogether.

Aziraphale was hardly bothering with his human form at all when he unfurled a huge wing and then the other, and then he leapt up off the sand into the wind and let out a great booming laugh. That was the thing humans might forget about angels: how much bigger they were than their skins, that whatever form a human saw an angel in was, inevitably, only the tip of the inconceivable iceberg.

Crowley stripped out of his own clothes with a thought and made a mad dash for the water’s edge. He took to the air just a footstep before he would have plunged into the ocean.

Aziraphale was smiling—it was a still a smile, he still had a face—it was still his dear smile, in his dear face. Perhaps it shouldn’t matter what face he wore, but after six thousand years of roughly the same face, Crowley had gotten attached to it. Aziraphale’s hair was raying out in the brilliant moonlight (the reflected light of the sun; he remembered the angelic geometries), and Crowley was simply sick to death with it.

He twisted in the air. He was a snake, after all, and sometimes he flew like a snake, as if he were gliding between trees in a jungle instead of catching the same wind that had recently touched Leeds.

“This _is_ a lark!” called Aziraphale to him, laughing, as they passed by one another. He was still wearing trousers. Around him there was a flickering sideways shift: the conjugation leaving him with brief, scattered traces of high angelic harmonics. His voice didn’t carry them, though. “What a marvelous idea!”

Crowley saw his smile, half-lit by the waves below them, and made a sudden, impulsive decision. (He had made impulsive decisions before, and they had nearly always been immense disasters, but he had never let that hold him back from newer, bigger disasters.)

He pulled a wing in and cut sharply towards Aziraphale, and crashed into him.

Aziraphale made a muffled, muddled noise of annoyance and amusement and affection, and then it choked off in a gasp, because they were _too close,_ again, in that way they’d been just the once before: Crowley well inside the limits of what Aziraphale’s external bounds would encompass.

It was astonishing. They crashed down, into the water; they were in only a few inches of surf, and it lapped at them, but Crowley could barely feel it. There was so much more to feel.

Aziraphale’s presence was electric. It made his body arch and sing, and being corporeal wasn’t all bad, had never been all bad, but at that moment there was a terrific feedback loop between his body and the harmonics, the resonance of his soul against Aziraphale’s—and Crowley might be a demon, but demons are made of angels. They thrilled against each other, _into_ each other, like colliding stars. Crowley remembered that—the rush of gigantic, engulfing balls of flame—and this was still more.

Aziraphale was gasping, grinding against him, and he was pushing back, and the proximity pushed them into a beat frequency of resonance—they weren’t overlapping in quite the right sequence, yet, but he could feel it coming, he was hard, he was straining against Aziraphale, Aziraphale was kissing him desperately, there was seawater brushing the sides of his face and salt on his lips and Aziraphale’s mouth on his and he was thrusting against Aziraphale’s sweet warmth and there, they were almost in sync, almost, _almost,_ and then the beat frequency hit them like a hammer and his body came without warning, Aziraphale’s, too, shuddering through the metaphysic ecstasy of it, and he couldn’t stop shaking for long, long minutes after it had happened, after their waveforms were receding further from the beat frequency, even as the water kissed them clean.

He couldn’t stop shaking, and he couldn’t stop kissing Aziraphale. Aziraphale was kissing him, too, but he reached up, stroking his fingertips over Aziraphale’s dear face, and he whispered, voice raw and broken and flat, one-dimensional, “don’t ever leave me again, please, please,” like some needing mewling thing. It was terrible. He should have hated it, violently, with all the messy, corrosive hatred the capacity for which he had spent millennia developing.

And Aziraphale—of course he wouldn’t, he _couldn’t_ promise anything. Crowley _knew_ that. Anyone you knew for the length of Creation wouldn’t be, quite, a mystery. But Aziraphale merely drew in a breath and said in a rush, “no, not unless I _have_ to, never again, I promise, darling, I promise.”

It was a benediction. By rights, it should have burned.

They stayed there until the sun came up. Their bodies didn’t need to get cold, so they didn’t.

When they stopped off for a bite on the way back to London, Aziraphale said thoughtfully, poking at his tomato with his fork, “D’you think they’ll still be spying on us?”

“Who knows?” Crowley shrugged. He hooked his ankle around Aziraphale’s under the table and was rewarded with a bright, sweet smile. “I’ll take the chance. Can’t be worse than those woodcuts.”

Aziraphale laughed out loud, glancing up at Crowley, away, and back again, and Crowley couldn’t help smiling at him.

“Do stop by my flat,” said Crowley. “I’ve got the most frightful record you should listen to. It’s… well, I think it’s high time you learned about the evolution of rock and roll. It _is_ evolving, and you’re dreadfully behind.”

Aziraphale gave him a patient, skeptical smile and stole a slice of his toast. “I suppose I can give it a try.”

“That’s the spirit.” Crowley watched Aziraphale fail to notice a smudge of jam at the corner of his mouth. “I think you’ll like Nirvana, once you get used to it.”

Aziraphale considered it thoughtfully. “It sounds nice.”

Crowley passed over his other slice of toast and miracled up an extra pot of marmalade.


End file.
